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4 Lessons Photography has taught me about Learning

If you follow me on the web, then you perhaps know that Im big on photography. I absolutely love taking pictures - my Flickr stream with about 13000+ pictures will tell you just that. Im no pro, but something makes me feel Ive gotten better with time. As I reflect on the last 10 years of having owned cameras, I think Ive some interesting insights on how adults learn. In todays post I want to share some of those thoughts with you and Id love to hear how you feel about what Im writing.

Learning is effective when its autonomous and purposeful

When I got my first digital camera I wasnt fussed about technique. I was just keen to take pictures. I think I had a 256 MB card for my camera and it was an absolute luxury for me. All I wanted to do was capture every moment of my life. You need to know something about me. I didnt grow up with many of the gadgets that kids my age in the west were exposed to. So I didnt have a computer or video games. I have some photographs of my life prior to getting a camera, but the frank truth is that we were always constrained by the 36 pictures on the film roll. The ability to take pictures and see them instantly was gratification enough for me. Gradually, I got interested in photography as an art and only over the last few years have I gotten over the desire to snapshot my life. Instead, I want to capture vivid moments that tell stories of their own. I havent yet been to a photography course. I havent let anyone dictate how I should shoot. As my purpose and subjects have changed, I have learned and my approach has evolved. I think this tells me something. It has taken me 10 years to learn what I know about photography, which frankly is precious little. On the other hand, someone else with a completely different purpose may have learned much quicker. I dont feel that Im stupid because I took 10 years - I didnt need to. I enjoy the autonomy with which I learned. My learning has served my purpose and thats all that matters.

Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.

Our educational systems are built around the premise of promoting success and success alone. I dont think theres anything wrong with celebrating success, but we cant forget that failure is a stepping stone to success. I love shooting wildlife. Unlike many other subjects, filming wildlife is a very unforgiving experience. I can safely say Ive had more failures than success filming wildlife and especially fast moving birds. A few days back I went to the lake near my house to try and follow the resident pied kingfishers. This is a curious bird and to watch it fish can provide hours of entertainment. It was no easy task filming these little geniuses given how skittish they can be. I failed at least four times before getting some satisfactory pictures on the fifth attempt. Failure was heartbreaking I must say, but the safety of knowing I have another chance gave me confidence. Each time I failed, I learned a little more. When I finally got the shot I wanted I was able to repeat my technique several times over. As you design learning experiences, how are you building in the safety to learn from failure?

Constraints make for great learning

When I bought my first camera, a simple point and shoot Yashica film device, Id complained heavily about the lack of zoom. That complaint carried on as I graduated to better, more expensive cameras and super-zoomers. What I failed to appreciate was that every camera has a built in zoom - our two feet! Ever since, Ive moved onto better equipment and longer lenses, but I must say my favourite lens today is a the 50mm prime that I own. Its a simple piece of equipment. It cant zoom, it has no image stabilization. That makes for great learning on how to get close to my subjects and how to keep my hand steady. In a similar manner I have learnt from the constraint of having to shoot vivid images through a single frame of a prosumer camera. Cameras dont see what our eyes see - theres way too much contrast to capture. This has led me to explore techniques such as high-dynamic-range (HDR photography) - the picture above is an example. I love placing meaningful constraints in the learning programs I design. For example at ThoughtWorks University I like to place the constraint of learning while on the job of delivering software to a client. It helps the new consultants to learn how to learn and gain useful experience on the side.

Theres no match to social media  and mobile platforms as learning tools

One of the things Ive learned from photography is that its extremely gratifying to get feedback from your friends, skilled or not. I often put up my photographs on Flickr and sometimes on Facebook. When people favourite my images or comment favourably on them I know that I must be doing something right. It motivates me to do more. Social media has been a big influence on my learning journey too. Twitter, Google Reader, Facebook and Flickr put together have become an integral part of my photography learning journey. The byte sized pieces of inspiration I get every day are just the right size to help me learn on a daily basis. Add to that inspiring mobile apps like Life and Guardian Eyewitness  help me analyse great professional photography. As Brent Schlenker writes on his blog, mobile apps and new media are removing the middlemen from the learning experience. I learn from the best today by following their blogs. Trey Ratcliffes blog is far more up-to-date than his book. Thats an example of how powerful the social media learning experience can be. The era of having to go to school is past. School comes to me - every day and at my own pace.

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Learning is an iterative, experiential process. We however seemed to have based corporate learning around a dated model of education which lacked autonomy, had little social structure and discouraged failure. I cant say my experience with photography is representative of all kinds of learning. I do think that there is something for us to think about as we analyse experiences such as these. Id love to hear how you feel about my musings today. I apologise my bad back has stopped me from being regular with my blog posts. As I grapple with this situation, I hope you continue to visit this blog as and when I post. Ill do my best to maintain a regular schedule as well. Hope you enjoyed todays post.

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4 Social Business Lessons I Learnt Last Week

The last week at work was great. Against several odds, we launched our internal social business platform - myThoughtWorks. The uptake until now with just three working days of operation, has been tremendous. Weve seen 1016 documents, 347 social bookmarks, 294 threads and 293 blogposts on the platform from about 524 contributing users. 1310 of our 1700 users are active on the platform and that is a huge win, given our vastly distributed nature. The last few weeks have also been a great learning opportunity for our team and while its easy to surround ourselves with those statistics and feel good about them, the truth is that our journey has only begun. In todays blogpost, I want to share with you some of my musings and our teams collective learnings from the weeks gone by.

Never Overlook Communication
I was chatting with Mark Needham last night. For all his eccentricities, Mark is a very reasonable guy and someone who just gets social media and social learning. Mark however, was one of the people who was taken by surprise with our launch of the new platform. When I spoke to him, he mentioned that while hed gotten the memos, none of them were interesting enough for him to pay any attention. It brought out a very interesting point. The meaning of your communication is in the response you get. If someone as connected as Mark knew nothing about the launch, it meant that we were perhaps not communicating effectively to get his attention. When we were launching MediaWiki in my previous firm, wed faced a similar experience. Corporate communication means nothing if no one receives your message. The success of a social business initiative does depend on effective communication leading up to the launch. This ensures that the key movers and shakers are already warming up to the idea. Shocking high potential users doesnt do much good. If one way doesnt work, try another. In coming weeks were planning several more roadshows, user meetups and other ways to make our communications click.

Understanding User Context is Key to Success
"Communication channels are highways of habit: people have their preferences and they generally stick to them." - Jono Bacon, The Art of Community
Everyone in the enterprise usually wants to contribute to its success. If social business is key to the success of your enterprise most reasonable people will want to jump in. Provided of course, you communicate well enough. This being said, we need to be empathetic towards the slower adopters. Its often not a lack of will to contribute, but the limitation of the performance context that stops people from being gung-ho adopters. Let me give you an example. Our most recent social learning implementation rests on the Google stack. We use Google Sites as a wiki, Google Groups for discussions, Google Chat for chatrooms and Google Videos for media sharing. The heart of the implementation however is Google Groups. For consultants at client site who are often coding at client computers, the easiest way to stay in touch with the rest of the company is email. When you add to that, limited access to ThoughtWorks systems, accessing any other platform becomes a big challenge. Google Groups gets around this problem quite well by providing simple mailing lists for communities. It also helps that a vast majority of western software developers like mailing lists! The move to a social business solution is great for our enterprise if adoption keeps going up as it has in the last three days. Adoption also depends on our empathy and responsiveness for user mindsets and context. In coming days we need to find ways not just to make things like email integration and mobile access seamless for our onsite consultants, but also to ensure that we can build such relationships with our clients that its not taboo to access the enterprise social network while onsite.

Choice is not Always a Great Thing
Every time you provide an option, youre asking the user to make a decision. - Joel Spolsky
Social media has transformed my learning and theres no doubt about that. I do remember though that when I first saw Twitter, I couldnt wrap my head around it. Its quite simple isnt it? Just 140 characters! For some reason I just didnt get it. The process of finding people to follow, setting up a client that works for you, choosing hashtags that matter was just too complicated for me back in the day. Ive struggled similarly with Facebook when it was new. Social media is like that. It becomes powerful when you make the right choices and personalise effectively. Personalisation however, is about making several choices and not everyone is happy to have choice. This is the part of the social business puzzle we need to figure out. While we want most people to make meaningful choices, how can we create useful defaults that the average user can get away with? The shorter the setup time, the easier it is to dive in and participate.

Intuitive is an Overloaded Word
We use the word intuitive way too loosely in design circles. We often debate pointlessly around little things thatll make our interfaces intuitive. This often reminds me of the old BSD bikeshed painting analogy that Sriram Narayanan pointed me to. The fact is that the little things that make a platform intuitive for one are the same things that make it unintuitive for another. Intuition is really a factor of context, experience and familiarity. When my mental model matches the model that an application provides, it seems intuitive. When mental models clash, its unintuitive. The catch with social business implementations is that they are unlikely to be intuitive to users that are unfamiliar with the social paradigm. In fact, I can say that even experienced users of social media who dont use it in a business context are likely to struggle at time. So instead of fussing over how to make the experience intuitive, its crucial that we make the experience learnable. Theres also no substitute to providing people support when they need it. Complaints are good - they are opportunities to connect with users, educate them and build relationships. Nikhil Nulkar, our enterprise community facilitator (a.k.a ninja) is great at doing just this.

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Learning is a continuous process and after going through several social learning initiatives and experiments, Im glad to be implementing a proper social business solution for my employers. Im learning heaps about this stuff, and as time goes on I want to share these insights with you. Id love to hear your thoughts about todays musings so please drop a line in the comments section and tell me.

Im going to be at Learning Solutions 2011 next week, so if youre in the vicinity please come and say hello. Itll be great to catch up.

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